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Automated placement of fabric for reinforced rubber products

Fabrics for reinforced rubber products are made by weaving high performance fibers such as Twaron, Kevlar, Nomex, Conex, Vectran, Teflon, polyester, and nylon. These fabrics are made by specialized companies like Warwick Mills. TANIQ is no manufacturer of fabrics but develops solutions to place these fabrics on the product using automated (robotic) solutions. So instead of manual wrapping of rubber sheets and fabric reinforced rubber sheets by skilled workers, these sheets can now be automatically placed by an industrial robot. The advantages of automated wrapping of fabric reinforced rubber sheets are:

• Less manual labour
• Repeatable quality
• No training of skilled workers required
• Reduces production time per product significantly

Fabric reinforcement versus fiber reinforcement

Fabric reinforcement offers a good technical solutions for many reinforced rubber products and can be easiliy applied manually by skilled workers. Therefore, many reinforced rubber products are made in Asian or Eastern Europe countries where wages for manual work are still low. However, many high end reinforced rubber products can be improved by improving the reinforcement structure. Especially for reinforced rubber products with complex shapes high improvements can be achieved by adjusting the fiber reinforcement. For example with rubber bellows such as rubber expansion joints. In a reinforced rubber bellow the fiber angles of the reinforcement structure should change gradually with a change in diameter of the bellow. With a prewoven fabric this is difficult and many times even impossible to achieve. In such a case to many fabric must be used to achieve the required result than necessary. Furthermore, bacuase the fabric can not be placed on the ideal angles on the bellow this will result in undesired radial or axial expansion behavior when pressuirzed. TANIQ has developed a new technology to calculate the fiber reinforcement angles for complex shaped products and can to predict how it will behave when pressurized. This technology allows you to optimize your product design on your computer and even simulate its behavior. Next you can upload your design to a robot which can automatically place your rubber sheets layers and your fiber reinforcement structure.